It turns out that one gee (1 g) is 1.03 light-years per year**2.
You accelerate at one gee for a year and (ignoring Einstein) you will be up near "c" and about 1/2 lightyear from Sol.
Consider a kilogram so accelerated. Its kinetic energy (classically, not relativistically) is 4.89x10**17 joules. A year is roughly pi times ten to the seventh power seconds. Hence the propulsive power that must be applied to the kilogram for a year is about 1500 megawatts. Call it two San Onofre nuclear power plants running full-tilt for a year. If our kilogram is going to have a useful payload and structure (i.e., non propulsion elements) the propulsion system must weigh much less than a kilogram. I'll give you 100 grams and 100 cubic centimeters. So the problem of interstellar flight is reduced to the problem of condensing two giant nuclear generating stations in to a volume of roughly a handful of sugar cubes. Scale up as needed until you get the "Enterprise".
The problem is that humans are too puny to deal in the sorts of energies we need. Sometimes I think of the problem like this: compress the Sun into an average sized office building and harness its power.
I have some questions I'm saving up for the Almighty:
1. Why did You put everything so bleeping far apart?
2. Why did You make us so short lived?
Looking at the way the universe is designed, it almost seems to have been deliberately arranged to prevent interstellar travel and interactions between (presumed) intelligent species...
--Boris
Dear boris,
Thank you for contacting My customer service department. The answers to your questions are:
1. Because I'm bigger than you, and because I could, but don't forget about sub-atomic particles and stuff like that.
2. The prototype was designed to live forever but you can see what kind of problems that would cause now. Just imagine what it would be like with people like Bill and Hitlery Clinton living forever, or at least for very long periods of time. They would just be roaming around the earth like vampires or something and you just couldn't get rid of them.
Hope that helps.
Sincerely,
God
Once upon a time, I was waching the JPL animation "Mars the Movie" and I had a striking revelation. I realized that watching that animation was as close to exploring Mars as I was ever going to get. In many respects it was better that really being in a spaceship and making the flight in person. I was able to fly through the Valis Marinaris trench at 200,000 miles per hour making high G force manuevers that would had killed me and destroyed my ship.
I saw a similar movie of a flyover of Venus' terrain and that settled it. Venus is covered with clouds. If I were to actually go to Venus I would be forced to view the surface on computer screens that display images built up using data from my spaceship's synthetic aperture radar as it peered through the hot dark sulphuric acid atmosphere.
In "Venus the Movie" I was able to experience the same thing minus the G forces.
If I were to travel to a typical nebula and look at it with my naked eyes through a window, a lot of detail would be too faint to see. I would need some sort of image intensification and would get my best view of it by looking at a computer screen. There are computer flythroughs now of the Orion Nebula. That's 3600 LY away!! How many lifetimes would it take to travel there? And, once I was there, why did I bother? I get my best view of it looking at a data set on a computer.
Unless we develop a way to wherever we want to go instantly, we will never be able to explore much of the universe by physical space travel. Space is just too big. Most science fiction has people tooling around in the Milky Way galaxy. There are billions of galaxies visible to us though. Those galaxies are seperated by distances that even fantasy writers don't want to cross.
It's inevitable\ that most space exploration will be done by telescope. There's no way around it. We will always be able to see farther that we can physically reach. But that's actually good enough. Why should we go to another star? You can't touch it, you can't even look at it.
It all boils down to this:
What we are doing now is about as good as it gets.
I always looked forward to a time when mankind would build a vast fleet of spacecraft and we would really get down to the business of space exploration. The future is now. We ARE exploring the universe. It won't be much different than now. We can travel faster and farther by building better telescopes. Faster than light travel won't take us to the distant galaxies we see. If there is an inteligent life in any neighboring star systems, we will be able to count the suckers on their hands by looking at them from earth long before we could travel there.
Quarantine?